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To Weber’s critics and supporters alike, the Holocaust serves as an example of the negative consequences of the means based reality of bureaucracy. To further explore this assertion, the mid-twentieth century mass genocide can be evaluated with both an ends-based rationality and Weber’s means-based rationality.
An ends-based rationality, in layman’s terms, means that we evaluate the ends of actions taken. This evaluation comes from judging the rationality of the goals, or ends, being pursued by an organization such as the Nazi Party. The stage for the Holocaust was set as Hitler and his party gained momentum in the country, utilizing anti semitism as a strategy for political control. The Jews functioned as a scapegoat for Germany’s failures, such as the economic crisis the country suffered after losing World War I. The end-goal of the Holocaust was Hitler’s “Final Solution”: the mass extermination of European Jews. To kill another person is irrational to many; to kill six million even more so. To pin Germany’s shortcomings on a very specific portion of society and subjecting them to concentration camps such as Auschwitz as some sort of retribution is now widely viewed as being preposterous. According to an ends-based rationality, the Holocaust was incredibly
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irrational in that its end or goal was to collectively wipe out an entire cultural group. According to Weber’s means-based rationality, these ends or goals “are taken as a given and we ask whether the organization is using the optimal methods to achieve them.” In other words, the rationality of the organization lies in its efficiency. In this particular case, Adolf Hitler and his party ran the concentration camps in an optimal way. For example, people the Nazis deemed as weak were killed immediately upon arrival, whereas the strong were forced into labor. With this, the camps only had to provide bare necessities to a much smaller group of people. The unpaid and forced labor performed by prisoners was for the economic gain of the country and the Third Reich. The Holocaust’s functionality was this: Jews worked and benefitted their oppressors until death. Prisoners were used in human experimentation in order to advance German medicine and Nazis also employed a number of scare tactics, such as public executions and humiliation, in order to further maintain the superordinate-subordinate relationship that existed in the camps. Both ends-based rationality and Weber’s means-based rationality express the ramifications of the Holocaust .
According to an ends-based rationality, the Holocaust was an extremely irrational event that is connected to the unrealistic goal of exterminating all Jews. Conversely, Weber’s means-based rationality suggests that the Holocaust was rational because the Nazis ran their camps optimally. This particular concept is extremely problematic in that it justifies the mass genocide on the basis of the camp’s functionality in economic terms. Although very different, the two types of rationality explain how organizations such as the Nazi Party and the bureaucracy can create lasting
repercussions.
...upying Poland in 1939, the policy of forced emigration became untenable for the Nazi regime. It was simply unrealistic to make more than 3 million Polish Jews emigrate. This led to ambitious Nazi plans for a solution to the ’Jewish Question’.” The Nazis wanted to keep their place to themselves, and they disliked the Jews. They tried moving the Jews to another place, but the amount of time it would take was too long. Therefore, they thought of the Final Solution. They sent Jews to concentration camps, where they killed many Jews. They though that this solution would keep their place to themselves, not to share with any other race. This reminds me of the Rwandan Genocide, because both genocides wanted to remove a specific group or race. In the Holocaust, they wanted to remove all Jews, and in the Rwandan Genocide, the Hutus wanted to wipe the whole Tutsis population.
Goldhagen's book however, has the merit of opening up a new perspective on ways of viewing the Holocaust, and it is the first to raise crucial questions about the extent to which eliminationist anti-Semitism was present among the German population as a whole. Using extensive testimonies from the perpetrators themselves, it offers a chilling insight into the mental and cognitive structures of hundreds of Germans directly involved in the killing operations. Anti-Semitism plays a primary factor in the argument from Goldhagen, as it is within his belief that anti-Semitism "more or less governed the ideational life of civil society" in pre-Nazi Germany . Goldhagen stated that a
Beautifully tragic, have you ever thought about what exactly happened during the Holocaust times. Well this review will walk you through how it was like to be taken from your home and watch it burn as you drive away, this will tell you how people who were Jews were treated just because they had a different religion. This will show the tragedies that happened leaving millions dead like they just vanished off the face of the earth.
At the start of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, no one would have been able to foresee what eventually led to the genocide of approximately six million Jews. However, steps can be traced to see how the Holocaust occurred. One of those steps would be the implementation of the ghetto system in Poland. This system allowed for Jews to be placed in overcrowded areas while Nazi officials figured out what to do with them permanently. The ghettos started out as a temporary solution that eventually became a dehumanizing method that allowed mass relocation into overcrowded areas where starvation and privation thrived. Also, Nazi officials allowed for corrupt Jewish governments that created an atmosphere of mistrust within its walls. Together, this allowed
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
The Third Reich sought to eliminate the Jews because the Germans viewed the Jews as parasites that were infecting their country and the world. With economic and physical pressure, Germany was able to encourage the Jews to flee Germany, however, not many left because of restrictions. The Nazis created the final solution in order to quickly eliminate all of the Jews that existed primarily in Germany. Through the use of medical experimentation, gas chambers, and the crematorium, around 6 million Jews were killed.
During the Holocaust the mass murder of jews was a worldwide tragedy and when a tragedy happens usually your first question is why? The two groups of devoted researchers for the Holocaust are split into the Intentionalist group and the Functionalist group. As said by Mimi-Cecilia Pascoe in Intentionalism and Functionalism: Explaining the Holocaust “The intentionalist position suffers greatly from a lack of adequate evidence, and consequently cannot prove Hitler’s intentions beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the functionalist position is better able to compensate for the lack of evidence, and thus provides a more solid historical explanation for the Holocaust (Pascoe 1).” The on going argument of whether the Holocaust was intentional or a choice in the moment is the Intentionalist vs. Functionalist case and either side has many different ways of portraying their evidence on the topic; the arguments are both have convincing arguments but in
Rubinstein, William D. The Myth of Bombing Auschwitz. The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. London: Routledge, 1997. 157-81. Print.
During the summer of 1941, Chancellor Adolf Hitler initialized “The Final Solution'; to the “Jewish Question';. Hitler started this program because he wanted to create a highly centralized state and one for the master race, Germans. Exterminating Jews was, for Hitler, the only way to create a perfect Germany because it would eliminate the ‘malignant tumors’, the race that caused Germany to lose World War One. Hitler’s decision to start exterminating Jews changed the course of history. In the end, over 6,000,000 Jews were killed and a Jewish state known as Israel, evolved.
According to the Webster dictionary, the holocaust is said to be the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II (“Webster Dictionary"). Economics on the other end is the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, or the material welfare of humankind. (“Webster Dictionary "). Intertwining this two words together holocaust economics can be referred to as the economic growth that took place during the holocaust period, and the fact that the exploitation Jewish labor led to the rise of the German economy.
...eir own humanity and become killers. This is why the United States and other world powers should create organizations like the United Nations to prevent the conditions that breed desperation, by providing, in order to prevent another such holocaust from occuring ever again. Works Cited: David Adler: We Remember the Holocaust, 1989 Henry Holt & Company, Inc. 115 W 18th St. New York, NY 10011 ~ Ole Kreiberg: Jewish Eyewitnesses, 3/11/1996 The Nizkor Project. Online. Internet. Available: http://www.nizkor.org/ ftp.cgi/people/r/reitlinger.gerald/ 3/12/1996 ~ McFee, Gordon Are the Jews Central to the Holocaust?, 2000 Online. Internet. Available: http://www.holocaust-history.org/jews-central/ 9/9/2000 ~ Abraham Resnick: The Holocaust, 1991 Lucent Books, Inc. P.O. Box 2890111 San Diego, CA 92198-9011 ~ Elie Wiesel: Night, 1960 Bantam Books 1540 Broadway New York, NY 10036
...he human depravity one can imagine. Even though Genocide did not begin with the Holocaust, Germany and Adolf Hitlers’ heartless desire for “Aryanization” came at the high cost of human violence, suffering and humiliation towards the Jewish race. These warning signs during the Holocaust, such as Anti-Semitism, Hitler Youth, Racial profiling, the Ghettos, Lodz, Crystal Night, Pogroms, and Deportation unraveled too late for the world to figure out what was going on and help prevent the horrors that came to pass. The lessons learned from all of this provide a better understanding of all the scars genocide leaves behind past and present. In spite the ongoing research in all of these areas today, we continue to learn new details and accounts. By exploring the various warning signs that pointed toward genocide, valuable knowledge was gained on how not to let it happen again.
The Holocaust, the mass killing of the Jewish people in Europe, is the largest genocide in history to this date. Over the course of the Holocaust nearly six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazi Party and Germany led by Adolf Hitler. There are multiple contributing factors to the Holocaust that made it so large in scope. Historians argue which of these factors were most significant. The most significant contributing factor is the source of the Holocaust, the reason it occurred. This source is Adolf Hitler and his hatred for Jewish people. In comparison to the choices of the Allies to not accept Jewish refugees and to not take direct military action to end the Holocaust, the most significant contributing factor of the Holocaust is that Adolf Hitler was able to easily rise to power with the support of the German people and rule Germany.
The Holocaust is one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity. "Hitler, in an attempt to establish the pure Aryan race, decided that all mentally ill, gypsies, non supporters of Nazism, and Jews were to be eliminated from the German population. He proceeded to reach his goal in a systematic scheme." (Bauer, 58) One of his main methods of exterminating these ‘undesirables' was through the use of concentration and death camps. In January of 1941, Adolf Hitler and his top officials decided to make their 'final solution' a reality. Their goal was to eliminate the Jews and the ‘unpure' from the entire population. Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp that carried out Hitler's ‘final solution' in greater numbers than any other.
Levi, Neil, and Michael Rothberg. The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Print.